When the assistant cannot answer

Four different states, and why none of them invents an answer.

Last updated 10 Aug 20261 min read

Four states

Sources appear but no answer is written
What it means
No language model is configured on this installation.
What to do
This is deliberate: rather than an invented answer, you get what was actually found. Talk to your administrator about enabling a model.
The message says the call failed
What it means
A model is configured but the request failed — an outage, a rate limit, or a service error.
What to do
Ask again. Note that this is not the same state as the one above and is reported separately on purpose: "not configured" and "failed" are two different problems.
An answer arrived with no sources at all
What it means
Nothing in your data was relevant. "Can you create a contact?" is a question about the tool, not about your data.
What to do
Nothing is broken. An empty citation set is itself an answer — better than attaching unrelated sources to a general reply.
It says it found nothing in the documents, but I know I uploaded one
What it means
The document is not indexed — either it is still processing, or its run lost pages.
What to do
Check the document's status. If pages were lost, retry it; indexing only happens after a clean run.

Why "I don't know" is taken this seriously

In work that gets delivered to a client, a confident wrong answer costs more than no answer. So wherever there is doubt, the assistant claims less rather than more.

If the assistant points at a source that does not exist, that citation is dropped — never widened back out to everything.

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